May 20, 2011
Arieh Handler, a Zionist leader who was in the room at the Tel Aviv Museum when David Ben-Gurion declared Israel’s independence in 1948, dies in Jerusalem at age 95.
Handler was born in 1915 in Bohemia, today part of the Czech Republic. After attending the 19th Zionist Congress as a delegate in 1935, he moved to Berlin and became the director of religious aliyah. Handler was issued papers by the Gestapo that enabled him to travel abroad to seek visas for Jews to leave Germany. While on a trip to Jerusalem in November 1938, Handler learned of the events of Kristallnacht in Germany and was told that it was not safe for him to return to Germany.
Handler moved to London in 1939 and became a founder of the Bnei Akiva youth movement in the United Kingdom. Bnei Akiva (Sons of Akiva), which started in 1929 in Jerusalem as the youth movement of Hapoel Ha-Mizrahi (the Eastern workers). It is a religious Zionist movement that, according to its founding document in 1922, “aspires to build the land according to the Torah and tradition and on the basis of labor, to create a material and spiritual basis for its members, strengthen religious feeling among the workers, and enable them to live as religious workers.” Hapoel Ha-Mizrahi was the forerunner to the National Religious Party.
Handler took a leading role in establishing training centers in England to prepare young people for aliyah by teaching Hebrew and agricultural skills.
Handler moved to Israel in early 1948 and took a leadership role in Hapoel Ha-Mizrahi. He received an invitation to the Declaration of Independence ceremony. In 1956, Prime Minister Moshe Sharett asked Handler, a banker by training, to return to London to help build up an insurance company owned by Bank Leumi. He continued to work for Zionist and Jewish causes in England, serving on the Board of Jewish Deputies. In 2006, at the age of 90, he made aliyah for a second time.